1) Apple fanbois who can't afford an Apple, or don't know about Boot Camp, or don't want to keep jumping between two different OSes, or just want a browser that looks like their iTunes.
2) Web devs who want their sites to look reasonable for any Mac visitors.
There's probably also a small number of people who might see it and be tempted to check out a full Apple computer because of it, but given that it'll stick out like a sore thumb in Windows then I doubt it.
It's not even that. Microsoft have their way in that regard now. What you own is the media with a binary copy of the application/operating system. What you license by agreement to the EULA is the rights to then install and use that software as a running process (or processes) on compatible hardware.
Yes, it sucks, but that's what free software is for.
We're probably a bit more likely to have it turn out like Better than Life (Red Dwarf) - we get sucked in to it and the whole world goes to pot in some shady machine.
I didn't at any point say that OOo is a word processor. OO Writer is a word processor, but OOo is the "office suite".
Yes workers need to communicate, yes Outlook is Microsoft's way of providing that, but why should the OOo team provide the full selection of what Microsoft does when there are already much more mature alternatives for the one part that isn't include and that isn't even directly connected in any way to the others?
For OOo to truly compete with MS Office it needs to do what it does that Office does well. You don't have to beat them on everything to be the best, just beat them on your strengths and leave the part that you've never touched to someone else who is even stronger at it.
It's like saying that to compete with Windows then Linux needs to bundle and be tightly integrated with a media player, a browser, a file manager, a picture viewer, a character map, some tacky games and whatever all else Windows includes. It doesn't. All Linux needs to do is do what it does well (be a stable and secure operating system) and let the Firefox/Totem/VLC/Xine/MPlayer/XMMS/Nautilus/Eye of Gnome/gThumb/etc provide the other functionality better than the core distro developers could.
An optional component may be okay at a push, but it just seems like a pointless diversion for the Open Office people. I use Thunderbird at home and at work (on our dev net, I have to use Outlook on the corporate Windows machine) and it's something distinct that has completely different criteria on it to an office suite.
By all means have one that OOo recommends as a good companion, but just because Microsoft bundle it in one package (or one of the more expensive ones) doesn't mean that the OOo team have to do the same.
And I do like plain text for emails - no point in having someone else's terrible idea of "good formatting" imposed on me or bloating the email with tags just so it can be shown in Arial rather than whatever font I choose;)
The main purpose of an email client is to send messages, where the main purpose is the content of the message and not its formatting.
The main purpose of a word processor is to produce a document, normally reasonably large, that can be properly type-set for reading as if it were a printed page or to actually print it. It can also be used with the mail merge from a database to create a print run of letters. Similarly, a spreadsheet is about calculations and graphs and the presentation of numbers, while a presentation creator is about the layout and communication of information in a fancy and eye-catching/memorable way. A database is the odd one out, but as I said it can be used with a mail merge. Since there isn't a defined interface to communicate between any word processor and any database in the same way that a "mailto" link tells your browser to tell your OS to open its email client and use the specified data (as far as I know) then an exception for databases and their inclusion in an 'office' package (for the sake of simple databases and mail merging) makes some degree of sense.
To me the differentiation between those two is important. Besides, while other apps may logically work together (mainly focussing on word processing, which can integrate and contain spreadsheets and database data) there's no logical link to an email client beyond "it can send the documents as attachments". I guess you could argue "mail merge with my address book", but that just means you need a better separation of "what I want to mail merge" and "people I contact via email", or a separate app from your email client that handles all of your contacts.
By your logic then since an email is like a document then surely we don't need a word processor, OO Writer should be canned, and everyone can start writing and printing multi-page emails instead of messing around with these pointless.odt/.doc files.
The last thing it needs is an Outlook replacement. I expect my word processing package to word process, not to try and manage my emails, personal contacts and calendar.
Bundling various document editors (word processing, spreadsheet and presentation) makes sense. Bundling database as an optional extra makes a bit of sense because Microsoft do it with Office and people expect it and use it (although it could easily be stand-alone if an interface for mail merging could be defined). Bundling mail as well makes no sense because it's not a document editor, it's a communication tool.
The long tradition of brewing beer in Budweis, Czech Republic, started in 1265. In 1895 they undertook the formal step to found an official brewery...
In 1876 a Czech emigrant started to brew a plagiarism of the original Budweiser Beer in the USA. During the following trademark dispute the Bohemians have been able to advocate their rights in most of the large number of court cases.
So Anheuser-Busch was the first to be corporate, but it's still taken from the region of the Czech Republic that had been brewing for centuries and only later formed an official brewery. Before then it was probably a collection of unofficial little breweries, but all still brewing proper Czech Budweiser.
That plus the Czechs actually have very nice beer as well. Give me a proper Buvar Budweiser any day of the week, especially over that American junk that stole its name.
Shows how interesting I found it. Thinking about it, we're responsible for Big Brother as well.
Why is all of our TV so terrible? Why are we so obsessed with "wannabe celebs"? And why do we get so much press about actual celebs doing stupid things?
OJ Simpson getting chased for potential murder or whatever - news. Amy Winehouse getting caught doing drugs again - not news (and better suited to the radio where I don't have to look at her face). Heath Ledger found dead - news. Heather Mills making millions out of getting married to and divorced from a Beatle - not news (or minor news).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in summary have the American Journal of Psychiatry released a report that an addiction to an entity resulting from a compulsion to use/have it should be added to a list of mental ilnesses/addictions that includes compulsions to use/have things?
What if I had an addiction to orange juice and drank it ever hour, on the hour, or else I suddenly got shakey and had withdrawl symptoms - would they add "orange juice addiction" to the list?
Sounds like a bit of a "well, duh" to me.
Also, I love the first line of TFA (emphasis mine):
Compulsive e-mailing and text messaging could soon become classified as an official brain illness.
Five hours of news and only 10 minutes of celebs? Based on most UK news that seems far too low. We borrow things like American Idol from the US and our TV is excessively Celebrity-centric, so what news channel were they watching that wasn't?!
Chances are they've been using their 'personal' USB sticks to transfer work documents. If that's the case and the agency have some form of classification level or protection for their information then more fool them for putting the information on a personal device.
It's the same in any military situation - hook a device up to a Restricted or higher machine and the only way to 'declassify' it is with a hammer.
Or, as some people have pointed out from TFA, it could be that these were purchases that they've been reimbursed for that they've just been using as if they were their own. Again, if that's the case, more fool them.
And my contact with 90% of Americans online, and the comments of the 10% of Americans who aren't the 90% who don't know the world outside their country/state, and every snippet of US news we see in the UK, and talking to my sister-in-law who has worked over there for about ten or more years (her green card is coming to an end, so however long that is), and from the in-laws who live in the UK but spend six months of the year out there (and didn't know about the Tsunami), and...
Yes, there'll be pockets of more knowledgable people (just like the UK has terrible news like the tabloids and Channel 5 news, although nothing as bad as Fox) but overall it looks quite dim.
Here's the sum total of everything Americans want to hear from the news: #1 Is it going to rain today? #2 Will my credit card still buy crap at the mall? #3 What's the score from all of our fine, patriotic sporting events this week?
About the same as what most Tabloid readers in the UK want as well then, but at least our news seems to cover other things. I guess they might be more interested in war (the sensationalised version) and which celebrity has done what to end up exposed/naked/caught with drugs as well.
"Who beat us at cricket this time?" is another common one, but when the World Series is 90% American then that probably comes under "patriotic sporting" in the US.
Clever (yet annoying). I found that link as well, but it doesn't work.
First time I hit the article (from the link in the summary) it loaded fine. Clicked your link and I got an ad with the "skip this ad" link (although the ad wasn't there because of AdBlock) then it took me to the main article across two pages.
Looks like those damned evil news people don't want us to avoid their adverts.
No, it's right, the American 'news' is a big hole that anything from outside disappears in to without a trace!
I was actually surprised at how little external news the US seems to get. I stayed in Colorado a couple of Christmases ago and the only way to get any form of news about the outside world was the BBC World Service. Yes, it's a big nation with a lot of its own news, but here in the UK we get news about the Middle East, Europe, politics, America, the Tsunami, Australia becoming America's lap dog (although nothing about us doing the same first), etc, so we know there's an outside world and that stuff happens in it.
but only when the software is in your distro's "click and run" library.
I'm only running Fedora, which is a comparatively small set of packages out of the distros, and it covers everything I need and more. I don't have a clue how much stuff Debian/Ubuntu must have. Most software I've wanted has either been in the repositories or else there has been a binary build/generic RPM of it on the site.
No iTunes. No Rhapsody. No Netflix.
No loss there. More places are doing DRM free music, so iTunes isn't the whole world (and it's seemingly got reasonable support in Wine if you really must keep it). Netflix send me films (well, Lovefilm, but same idea) so me and 90%+ of the population don't care if we can't pay to download something that we can't use later.
No games with production values to rival Pixar. Unless iD is in a charitable mood.
Depends what you do. I've installed Dawn of War: Soulstorm recently under Wine and it runs at about Windows speeds. SecuRom support isn't perfect yet, but there are ways around it.
DRM simply enforces a license.
And causes problems for legitimate customers that the pirates it is supposed to stop easily and quickly circumvent. I can see that DRM has its place in rental downloads as there is no other way to limit how long the user keeps it for, but when you 'buy' something like an MP3 then you should buy it, not effectively rent it for as long as the supplier supplies an app that can read it.
You don't own a GPL'd app any more than you own Bioshock.
GPL software gives you the right to use it for as long as you want. Most commercial apps have licenses that say "you thought you bought this, but really you're just renting it". Open source is about as close to owning it as you can get.
1) Open Smart package manager 2) Find program in list 3) Mark for install 4) Run install 5) Enjoy program
ATI isn't the greatest, but I've not had too many problems, Compiz and DirectX under Wine is working fine and I've even installed the latest version from the ATI package rather than from the Livna repo.
Ever tried stopping a process in Windows and the OS wouldn't let you?
Yes, and I've also had Linux do the same thing. It didn't give an error, but no matter how many times I "kill -9"ed it the process never paid attention to the command and carried on churning away. I guess that's the process rather than the OS, but it's still not always "all-powerful root".
I think a more accurate list (from my view at least) is:
1. Linux gives you complete control 2. Linux is free (as-in-speech) 3. Software install is easy 4. It has less potential problems with web dev for a Linux server 5. No DRM! You own the hardware, you own the software, you own the data.
Oh, and the penguin is more cuddly than some flag or some annoying animated critter;)
Yum has the option to do it by package group like that, so it is possible, just not from Smart. Unfortunately the Fedora team have set the dependencies up in such a way that you can't just get the new Gnome from Fedora 9 dev and install it on Fedora 8, it ends up updating a huge swathe of other stuff as well that effectively leaves you with a Fedora 9 install.
And for anyone who is unfortunate enough not to know Eddie Izzard or who hasn't seen "Dress to Kill", the section is:
And Hitler ended up in a ditch, covered in petrol, on fire, so, that's fun! I think that's funny, 'cause he was a mass-murdering fuckhead. And that was his honeymoon as well! Double trouble!
"Eva, let's marry."
"Where should our honeymoon be?"
"Well, in a ditch, covered in petrol, on fire. I've already arranged it upstairs."
"Oh, how romantic, Adolf."
"Yes, I thought!"
Fun! What a bastard! And he was a vegetarian, and a painter, so he must have been going, "I can't get the fucking trees... Damn! I will kill everyone in the world!"
And he was a mass-murdering fuckhead, as many important historians have said. But there were other mass murderers that got away with it! Stalin killed many millions, died in his bed, well done there; Pol Pot killed 1.7 million Cambodians, died under house arrest at age 72, well done indeed! And the reason we let them get away with it is because they killed their own people, and we're sort of fine with that. "Ah, help yourself," you know? "We've been trying to kill you for ages!" So kill your own people, right on there. Seems to be... Hitler killed people next door... "Oh... stupid man!" After a couple of years, we won't stand for that, will we? Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people. We can't even deal with that! You know, we think if somebody kills someone, that's murder, you go to prison. You kill 10 people, you go to Texas, they hit you with a brick, that's what they do. 20 people, you go to a hospital, they look through a small window at you forever. And over that, we can't deal with it, you know? Someone's killed 100,000 people. We're almost going, "Well done! You killed 100,000 people? You must get up very early in the morning. I can't even get down the gym! Your diary must look odd: "Get up in the morning, death, death, death, death, death, death, death - lunch- death, death, death - afternoon tea - death, death, death - quick shower..."
So I suppose we're glad that Pol Pot's under house arrest... you know, 1.7 million people. At least he - we know where he is - under house arrest! Just don't go in that fucking house, you know? I know a lot of people who'd love to be under house arrest! They bring you your food... "Just stay here? Oh, all right. (singing laconically ) Have you got any videos?" You know, you just sit there all day... And Pol Pot was a history teacher. And Hitler was a vegetarian painter. So... mass-murderers come from the areas you least expect it. I don't know how the flip comes over, but it happens.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there's two target audiences:
1) Apple fanbois who can't afford an Apple, or don't know about Boot Camp, or don't want to keep jumping between two different OSes, or just want a browser that looks like their iTunes.
2) Web devs who want their sites to look reasonable for any Mac visitors.
There's probably also a small number of people who might see it and be tempted to check out a full Apple computer because of it, but given that it'll stick out like a sore thumb in Windows then I doubt it.
It's not even that. Microsoft have their way in that regard now. What you own is the media with a binary copy of the application/operating system. What you license by agreement to the EULA is the rights to then install and use that software as a running process (or processes) on compatible hardware.
Yes, it sucks, but that's what free software is for.
We're probably a bit more likely to have it turn out like Better than Life (Red Dwarf) - we get sucked in to it and the whole world goes to pot in some shady machine.
I didn't at any point say that OOo is a word processor. OO Writer is a word processor, but OOo is the "office suite".
Yes workers need to communicate, yes Outlook is Microsoft's way of providing that, but why should the OOo team provide the full selection of what Microsoft does when there are already much more mature alternatives for the one part that isn't include and that isn't even directly connected in any way to the others?
For OOo to truly compete with MS Office it needs to do what it does that Office does well. You don't have to beat them on everything to be the best, just beat them on your strengths and leave the part that you've never touched to someone else who is even stronger at it.
It's like saying that to compete with Windows then Linux needs to bundle and be tightly integrated with a media player, a browser, a file manager, a picture viewer, a character map, some tacky games and whatever all else Windows includes. It doesn't. All Linux needs to do is do what it does well (be a stable and secure operating system) and let the Firefox/Totem/VLC/Xine/MPlayer/XMMS/Nautilus/Eye of Gnome/gThumb/etc provide the other functionality better than the core distro developers could.
An optional component may be okay at a push, but it just seems like a pointless diversion for the Open Office people. I use Thunderbird at home and at work (on our dev net, I have to use Outlook on the corporate Windows machine) and it's something distinct that has completely different criteria on it to an office suite.
;)
By all means have one that OOo recommends as a good companion, but just because Microsoft bundle it in one package (or one of the more expensive ones) doesn't mean that the OOo team have to do the same.
And I do like plain text for emails - no point in having someone else's terrible idea of "good formatting" imposed on me or bloating the email with tags just so it can be shown in Arial rather than whatever font I choose
The main purpose of an email client is to send messages, where the main purpose is the content of the message and not its formatting.
.odt/.doc files.
The main purpose of a word processor is to produce a document, normally reasonably large, that can be properly type-set for reading as if it were a printed page or to actually print it. It can also be used with the mail merge from a database to create a print run of letters. Similarly, a spreadsheet is about calculations and graphs and the presentation of numbers, while a presentation creator is about the layout and communication of information in a fancy and eye-catching/memorable way. A database is the odd one out, but as I said it can be used with a mail merge. Since there isn't a defined interface to communicate between any word processor and any database in the same way that a "mailto" link tells your browser to tell your OS to open its email client and use the specified data (as far as I know) then an exception for databases and their inclusion in an 'office' package (for the sake of simple databases and mail merging) makes some degree of sense.
To me the differentiation between those two is important. Besides, while other apps may logically work together (mainly focussing on word processing, which can integrate and contain spreadsheets and database data) there's no logical link to an email client beyond "it can send the documents as attachments". I guess you could argue "mail merge with my address book", but that just means you need a better separation of "what I want to mail merge" and "people I contact via email", or a separate app from your email client that handles all of your contacts.
By your logic then since an email is like a document then surely we don't need a word processor, OO Writer should be canned, and everyone can start writing and printing multi-page emails instead of messing around with these pointless
The last thing it needs is an Outlook replacement. I expect my word processing package to word process, not to try and manage my emails, personal contacts and calendar.
Bundling various document editors (word processing, spreadsheet and presentation) makes sense. Bundling database as an optional extra makes a bit of sense because Microsoft do it with Office and people expect it and use it (although it could easily be stand-alone if an interface for mail merging could be defined). Bundling mail as well makes no sense because it's not a document editor, it's a communication tool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budweiser_(Anheuser-Busch)
So Anheuser-Busch was the first to be corporate, but it's still taken from the region of the Czech Republic that had been brewing for centuries and only later formed an official brewery. Before then it was probably a collection of unofficial little breweries, but all still brewing proper Czech Budweiser.
Oh well, at least that's some terrible televisual crap that we can't be blamed for :D Although it looks like we weren't too far behind.
That plus the Czechs actually have very nice beer as well. Give me a proper Buvar Budweiser any day of the week, especially over that American junk that stole its name.
Shows how interesting I found it. Thinking about it, we're responsible for Big Brother as well.
Why is all of our TV so terrible? Why are we so obsessed with "wannabe celebs"? And why do we get so much press about actual celebs doing stupid things?
OJ Simpson getting chased for potential murder or whatever - news. Amy Winehouse getting caught doing drugs again - not news (and better suited to the radio where I don't have to look at her face). Heath Ledger found dead - news. Heather Mills making millions out of getting married to and divorced from a Beatle - not news (or minor news).
What if I had an addiction to orange juice and drank it ever hour, on the hour, or else I suddenly got shakey and had withdrawl symptoms - would they add "orange juice addiction" to the list?
Sounds like a bit of a "well, duh" to me.
Also, I love the first line of TFA (emphasis mine):
Five hours of news and only 10 minutes of celebs? Based on most UK news that seems far too low. We borrow things like American Idol from the US and our TV is excessively Celebrity-centric, so what news channel were they watching that wasn't?!
Chances are they've been using their 'personal' USB sticks to transfer work documents. If that's the case and the agency have some form of classification level or protection for their information then more fool them for putting the information on a personal device.
It's the same in any military situation - hook a device up to a Restricted or higher machine and the only way to 'declassify' it is with a hammer.
Or, as some people have pointed out from TFA, it could be that these were purchases that they've been reimbursed for that they've just been using as if they were their own. Again, if that's the case, more fool them.
Great argument. It's a good job I was approximating numbers based on the people I've had contact with and not using statistics then ;)
And my contact with 90% of Americans online, and the comments of the 10% of Americans who aren't the 90% who don't know the world outside their country/state, and every snippet of US news we see in the UK, and talking to my sister-in-law who has worked over there for about ten or more years (her green card is coming to an end, so however long that is), and from the in-laws who live in the UK but spend six months of the year out there (and didn't know about the Tsunami), and...
Yes, there'll be pockets of more knowledgable people (just like the UK has terrible news like the tabloids and Channel 5 news, although nothing as bad as Fox) but overall it looks quite dim.
About the same as what most Tabloid readers in the UK want as well then, but at least our news seems to cover other things. I guess they might be more interested in war (the sensationalised version) and which celebrity has done what to end up exposed/naked/caught with drugs as well.
"Who beat us at cricket this time?" is another common one, but when the World Series is 90% American then that probably comes under "patriotic sporting" in the US.
Clever (yet annoying). I found that link as well, but it doesn't work.
First time I hit the article (from the link in the summary) it loaded fine. Clicked your link and I got an ad with the "skip this ad" link (although the ad wasn't there because of AdBlock) then it took me to the main article across two pages.
Looks like those damned evil news people don't want us to avoid their adverts.
No, it's right, the American 'news' is a big hole that anything from outside disappears in to without a trace!
I was actually surprised at how little external news the US seems to get. I stayed in Colorado a couple of Christmases ago and the only way to get any form of news about the outside world was the BBC World Service. Yes, it's a big nation with a lot of its own news, but here in the UK we get news about the Middle East, Europe, politics, America, the Tsunami, Australia becoming America's lap dog (although nothing about us doing the same first), etc, so we know there's an outside world and that stuff happens in it.
I'm only running Fedora, which is a comparatively small set of packages out of the distros, and it covers everything I need and more. I don't have a clue how much stuff Debian/Ubuntu must have. Most software I've wanted has either been in the repositories or else there has been a binary build/generic RPM of it on the site.
No loss there. More places are doing DRM free music, so iTunes isn't the whole world (and it's seemingly got reasonable support in Wine if you really must keep it). Netflix send me films (well, Lovefilm, but same idea) so me and 90%+ of the population don't care if we can't pay to download something that we can't use later.
Depends what you do. I've installed Dawn of War: Soulstorm recently under Wine and it runs at about Windows speeds. SecuRom support isn't perfect yet, but there are ways around it.
And causes problems for legitimate customers that the pirates it is supposed to stop easily and quickly circumvent. I can see that DRM has its place in rental downloads as there is no other way to limit how long the user keeps it for, but when you 'buy' something like an MP3 then you should buy it, not effectively rent it for as long as the supplier supplies an app that can read it.
GPL software gives you the right to use it for as long as you want. Most commercial apps have licenses that say "you thought you bought this, but really you're just renting it". Open source is about as close to owning it as you can get.
It's easy enough for me:
1) Open Smart package manager
2) Find program in list
3) Mark for install
4) Run install
5) Enjoy program
ATI isn't the greatest, but I've not had too many problems, Compiz and DirectX under Wine is working fine and I've even installed the latest version from the ATI package rather than from the Livna repo.
Yes, and I've also had Linux do the same thing. It didn't give an error, but no matter how many times I "kill -9"ed it the process never paid attention to the command and carried on churning away. I guess that's the process rather than the OS, but it's still not always "all-powerful root".
I think a more accurate list (from my view at least) is:
1. Linux gives you complete control
2. Linux is free (as-in-speech)
3. Software install is easy
4. It has less potential problems with web dev for a Linux server
5. No DRM! You own the hardware, you own the software, you own the data.
Oh, and the penguin is more cuddly than some flag or some annoying animated critter
Only if your virus is of the "make you freer, healthier and happier" type.
Yum has the option to do it by package group like that, so it is possible, just not from Smart. Unfortunately the Fedora team have set the dependencies up in such a way that you can't just get the new Gnome from Fedora 9 dev and install it on Fedora 8, it ends up updating a huge swathe of other stuff as well that effectively leaves you with a Fedora 9 install.
http://www.auntiemomo.com/cakeordeath/d2ktranscription.html#history